Two intriguing boxes that’s been on my wish list for a while is Biscuit by OTO Machines and the Geiger Counter by WMD. For those of you not familiar with them, they both focus on the sort of crunchy sound you get from bit reduction, but with different approaches. I tried replicating them on the G2 and came up with…well, not so satisfying results for different reasons. But I took what I think is the best pieces of both replicas and put them into one single patch that suited the G2 sound/modules and the interface better. I've also tried fine tuning the "gain stages" and overdrive circuitry. I'm quite happy with the result. It have satisfied some of my appetite for the sound of sweet, crunchy crumbles… Hope you like it!

I've tried my best to make the interface as logical and fast worked as possible. These are the paramater assignments:

Looking at the bit masking part of your patch (on the jpg, not loaded it up yet). Is that providing you with stages of bit reduction between say 7 bit and 6 bit?

If so that is smart, I take it sounds better than just using the bit quantization in the digitizer?

Have you tried using the SeqCTR module to do wave shaping? It might help get you more of the WMD style processing.

If you prepare the signal before you send it into the seqctr, e.g. make it positive only and use a mixer to scale it down to say 25%.. It means you can just use say the first 4 sequencer levels to create your waveshaping, easier than trying to use all 16. I found that using 9 seq steps tended to produce the best results whilst still keeping it easy to use.

Anyway I've been meaning to load this patch up, so I'll try it tonight and thanks for posting.

Looking at the bit masking part of your patch (on the jpg, not loaded it up yet). Is that providing you with stages of bit reduction between say 7 bit and 6 bit?

Yeah, it does. I don't completely grasp how yet, but it does. You can lower the resolution in finer increments (128 of them) so you can fine tune the bit reduction much more than with the digitizer. I've been on a quest to try to understand the concept of bitmasking in this thread: http://www.electro-music.com/forum/post-344560.html#344560

iPassenger wrote:

Have you tried using the SeqCTR module to do wave shaping? It might help get you more of the WMD style processes.

If you prepare the signal before you send it into the seqctr, e.g. make it positive only and use a mixer to scale it down to say 25%.. It means you can just use say the first 4 sequencer levels to create your waveshaping, easier than trying to use all 16. I found that using 9 seq steps tended to produce the best results whilst still keeping it easy to use.

I have tried the SeqCTR module for custom wave shaping, but I had trouble "tuning" the "gain stages" to make it sound right. I will give it another try. I did get some tasty and unusual harmonics out of it. And I'm going to try using a mixer like you suggest.

iPassenger wrote:

I've been meaning to load this patch up, so I'll try it tonight and thanks for posting.

If understand it right you use the mixer to scale down the constant amplitude of the osc to 50% so it only uses the first 9 steps in the CtrlSeq. And since the signal is symmetrical you don't have to split the signal in positive and negative, right? But how about when you feed it with external audio that's not symetrical, would you have to split the signal in two, and what happens with DC offset then? Also, external audio is not of constant amplitude unless you compress it really hard, so what would be the best way to scale that kind of signal?

In my Geiger Counter patch I have borrowed a wave shaper patch from Fozzie (user here) where the signal is split into positive and negative with a rectifier and there is a higpass filter that supposedly takes care of the DC offset. But I'm not into the technical side of these things and can't tell wether that works as intended or not. My biggest issue though with that patch is to get the amount of wave shaping/distortion I want without clipping/overloading the CtrlSeq. Only way I have found so far is to use a compressor, but I don't want to compress the audio too much. Ideas on this would be very helpful.

If understand it right you use the mixer to scale down the constant amplitude of the osc to 50% so it only uses the first 9 steps in the CtrlSeq. And since the signal is symmetrical you don't have to split the signal in positive and negative, right?

Not entirely sure I know what you mean.. But the signal is made positive only, then scaled to max/min at a value of 32/0 (with 16 being no sound).

Re: symmetry.. There is no need to worry about this, steps lower than 5 represent the negative half of the signal while steps higher than 5 represent the positive half of the signal.

You could of course scale the signal differently and use a different number of steps. Making the number of steps odd means you always have a centre step (in this case 5) which you can set to 0 so that the signal is nulled on a null input, setting 5 to another value like 64 means that the output on zero in would be 64. Nothing stopping you of course, plus you can also use this processing on control signals not just audio.

Obviously this whole process is easier with an osc but an input signal would need simply to be attenuated so you were getting roughly the same result. Maybe stick a clipper straight after the input so that it restricts the range and then watch the levels a bit, if you put a comparator after the input as well in parrallel you could look for it triggering so that you got visual feedback of clipping occuring... Mild clipping before all the processing shouldn't really spoil the distortion/waveshaping effect anyway but it might be nice to know how much it is happening. This would help avoid the other option which is of course compression/limiting before the input.

If you want to really go mental there is nothing stopping you from then running that patch through another ctrl-seq shaper to grunge it further, as your then applying the waveshaping to an already waveshaped signal.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum

Please support our site. If you click through and buy from our affiliate partners, we earn a small commission.